Leareth drags himself out of a gluey sleep. He vaguely remembers answering some bizarre question about a turtle and he still isn't sure if that was a dream or not. He feels pretty terrible right now. 

Work to do, though. He asks Emril to have the autodoc get him more alert. 

- and, when she gets the word, Nayoki spools out the Gate-search - this takes just under ten seconds - and weaves the other end, freestanding, and looks through for an instant before crossing. 

It's a hallway with a plastic tiled floor and locked doors in three directions.

Where's the human test subject. First priority is to grab him and toss him back through the Gate– okay, her other tied-for-first priority, which she will do at the same time, is to push her Mindhealing Gift range as far as she can, boosting hard from reserves since she doesn't have a node, and set-command everyone within a fifty-yard radius to STOP MOVING TAKE NO ACTIONS while she finds and grabs the test subject and gets him OUT of here - 

He's cowering against the back wall in a thick pool of proto-goo, which has coalesced into some structures, some crystalline and some leaflike.

He's also set-commanded not to move right now, she wasn't very discriminating.

She yanks him over to her with a force-net and flings him through the Gate that way; it's faster than grabbing him physically and also doesn't risk her getting Proto'd; it's probably a lot more disorienting and terrifying for him but Emril's right there on the other side. 

- all right, Thoughtsensing extended to its full limit, where are the minds, how many did she manage to incapacitate, how many were beyond her range but still in the same lab complex and where are they - 

There are about two dozen who are incapacitated, scientists and research assistants taking notes for them and a couple of operations people running the machinery that's been conducting tests and providing math visuals. There's another dozen who aren't, mostly security, and they've noticed the breach and are triggering the lab's self-destruct, if the proto's getting out then the only thing that matters is stopping it -

Wow. Okay. She had really hoped Leareth was wrong about that part, that in fact not everyone in this world would be as goddamned paranoid as him - 

Focus. She doesn't have a lot of time. 

She fixes in on wherever the biggest or loudest-thoughts cluster of security people is and mindreads one of them as hard as she can to grab a visual of the room and then - hold that - the Roci is moving really fast which is not going to help, here, but she stretches out to the full extent of her Gift and relays this to the mages on board, :- self-destruct triggered get in NOW find out what the failsafes are what we need to stop -: 

:Leareth wants you to get out if there's danger: the mage reminds her.

He, on the other hand, is cleared for a suicide mission here if necessary, and he's not delighted about it - especially given the part where they're in another goddamned world and might never make it back to Velgarth and so why does it matter that his next-of-kin are on file for the very generous death-in-the-line-of-duty benefits... 

He knew a long time ago what he signed up for, though. 

Every second he waits makes the range longer. He raises a Gate on the nearest vaguely-door-ish structure that showed up in the shared visuals and drops on top of whoever's there and compulsions the person and whoever else is around to FREEZE and then starts ransacking minds -

Security people! They're so incredibly confused! Some of them were going for their firearms but didn't get to it before freezing. The 'protomolecule presumed to have escaped containment' alarm is triggered automatically, though, and it should collapse the building inwards with some high-powered neatly timed explosives if not disabled within a minute, and launch some missiles from external sites at the base in case the explosives don't sterilize the place. 

(They're upset about this! They don't want to die!)

Aaaaaaaah! 

Leareth's mage is going to try really hard to ram through some mind-control and get them to disable the alarm before it's been a minute! 

(There is a very brief back-and-forth on whether it's worth getting Nayoki over, but in fact the risk to her seems too high -) 

Information on the attack is passed on to Nayoki, who relays it to Leareth - via the Proto, the ship is still moving fast and now out of comfortable Mindspeech range. 

Leareth is going to wait to see if that works, but if it doesn't they won't have a lot of time, so he needs to prepare other contingency plans first. 

Without actually Mindspeaking it at the Proto yet, he starts formulating how he would communicate 'danger, resembling this, you need to solve the engineering problem of preventing the building from collapsing.'

And he waits to hear the results of his mage's efforts. 

Nayoki is preparing a force-net to grab all the scientists too and throw them into the cargo hold of the Roci. She doesn't want them to die if the lab is lost. For one, they might have a lot of key information. 

...She is, currently, undecided on whether to grab the Proto, though at least it's a lot less squishy than the humans here and might survive mostly intact if they manage to partially disable the protomolecule safeguards. 

They can unilaterally disable a single alarm by marking it as a false alarm but, uh, there are quite a lot of alarms going off and the system is refusing to believe that they're all false alarms and wants an override from the director. 

(These people were not told that they could not override the 'blow up the facility' alarms and they're also not sure why their bodies are non-volitionally moving and they're mostly super confused! The director's not even on site!)

(The scientists are ENTIRELY upset about how these INTRUDERS are MESSING UP ALL THE DATA but they're very very upset about that.)

:Nayoki, get yourself and the scientists out. Now: 

To his mage, :- prioritize disabling the missiles and then get out. ...Have one of them pull up a schematic if you can, I will - have the Proto try to mitigate the damage -: 

He has mostly finishes translating the DANGER, and his plan for what the Proto needs to do about it, into the sort of math-y visualization that the Proto understands. Usually. Probably. They don't exactly have a lot of time. 

:Danger: he informs it. :Here: 

Showing the location, not spatially, but based on the resources salient to it, the radiation from the reactor that it's feeding on - the explosives might also release radiation but he doesn't know if the Proto can eat it - 

:- Gate here and here and here and here - redirect these forces - optimization problem, fast, time limit -: 

He's giving the Proto all the information he has in the most legible format he can manage and he has no idea if it's going to be enough. 

(Nayoki and the scientists tumble through a Gate into the Roci's cargo hold and land with a thump, the Gate snapping down within a fraction of a second.)

Gate ALL THESE PLACES right now and EAT ALL THAT RADIATION? It can do that!!!!!!!

It's still drawing on Leareth's reserves, for Gates. It opens eighteen of them.

They are very small Gates and the Proto is reasonably efficient, but Leareth is not exactly in top condition going into this, and the Proto drains all of his reserves in a fraction of a second. At which point the Gates are still up and now tied directly to Leareth's life-force and there are quite a lot of them - 

This is almost immediately obvious enough to panic the Healers, and within a second or so it's visible to the autodoc as well, in half a dozen ways that should not be straightforwardly physically possible in that time interval - his heart rate spikes, his blood pressure and oxygen saturation both plummet, his blood sugar is suddenly well below the safe threshold - his body temperature is abruptly multiple degrees too low and still dropping - 

"It, uh, wants you to restart the machine -"

:How long is that going to take - it's not a false alarm, he's dying -: 

It took her WAY too long to think of this - Emril Mindtouches the Proto. :What are you doing, you need to stop: 

"If it's not a false alarm I guess I can dismiss that - dismiss that too - uh, it's administering more epilepsy drugs, and sedatives for his heart rate, and something for hypoten - for blood pressure - it wants to put him back on oxygen -"

      :It's Gating from his reserves -: 

:Is the danger fixed?: Emril asks the Proto. :If it's safe you can take the Gates down: 

Leareth is unconscious within two seconds.

Three seconds in, Leareth's body is approximately out of all its metabolic resources. He's not really responding to any of the drugs - his blood pressure is low enough that the machine mostly isn't getting a reading at all; his heart is still beating, technically, but not being very successful at pumping blood. 

The protomolecule has NO INFORMATION about whether the danger is fixed. The radiation is being eaten.